Maps and data

When a company like Google says they are using TeleAtlas or Navteq, I
know they mean the mapping data but does this mean the map drawings too
or this is an engine that Google wrote to process and display the data?

Thanks
Sam

samabdelmalek@gmail.com wrote:

Actually, TeleAtlas and Navteq make street data only (ok, Points of
Interest too): Google satellite images come from elsewhere.



Google wrote its own engine from scratch: it didn't even care about
established GIS standards such as WFS and WMS.

Regards,
--------------------
Luca Morandini
www.lucamorandini.it
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Luca -

FYI, Google did not entirely write their application suite. They have a
number of partners (content and software technology) upon which
GoogleMaps and GoogleEarth are built. The geocoding, navigation, and
routing engine is from companies such as deCarta (formerly TelContar)
http://www10.giscafe.com/nbc/articles/view_weekly.php?run_date=21-Feb-2005 .
Google purchased Keyhole for their 3D visualization technology
(GoogleEarth) and most recently purchased SketchUp
(http://sketchup.google.com/ ).

Recently, Google joined the OGC as a high-level member. Google
definitely does care about the effective and proper use of standards.
For example, Google Earth EC supports an integrated WMS server. Then
there are dozens of applications/implementations in which organizations
or individual engineers have integrated GoogleMaps and GoogleEarth with
WMS, WFS, and other OGC standards. There are also GML to KML and KML to
GML tools. Some of these are open source and others are commercial.
Most are now in production use.

Regards

Carl

wrote:


Just to back this up, I heard a talk by Ron Lake (Mr GML!) at a
meeting of ISO TC211 comparing KML and GML. Philosophically they are
rather different as GML is a content transfer mechanism, and as a
matter of principle does not provide rendering information; that is
the job of other standards such as SLD. KML provides both data and
rendering information. Furthermore, KML has no mechanism for
specifying the coordinate system in use (it assumes it is always the
same). However, it is relatively straightforward to render GML into
KML, as there is sufficient similarity in the data models for this to
work. KML is not really suitable for transfer of information between
GIS software packages, but it is fine for a visualization package such
as Google Earth.

Paul

Standards Guy wrote:

Well, if I did, it would have added WMS and WFS interfaces to Google
Maps: I hope this attitude will change.



I missed this bit: could you give me a link to it ?



Well, it's great to have a community filling the holes in Google's
products, but standard interfaces should have been there from the start,
at least as an option.

Regards,

--------------------
Luca Morandini
www.lucamorandini.it
--------------------